The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Islam, Rape and Theology

by Bruce BawerFive days before 9/11, a famous Norwegian social anthropologist (and
Norway may well be the only nation on Earth where there is such a thing
as a famous social anthropologist) instructed her countrywomen that the
way to bring down the high number of rapes – most of which, even way
back then, were already being committed by “non-Western immigrants” –
was for them to stop dressing in a manner that Muslim men found
provocative. Norway, she lectured, was steadily becoming “a
multicultural society,” and Norwegian women, if they didn’t want to wind
up being brutally ravished in an alleyway by some Pakistani gang,
should choose their wardrobes appropriately. Period.

That anthropologist, whose name is Unni Wikan, didn’t score any
points that day for heroically championing women’s equality, but she
was, at least, being honest. The rise in rapes in Norway – as throughout
Western Europe – was almost entirely a product of Islamic immigration.
That was a fact she didn’t attempt to disguise.

Then, however, came 9/11. And in the years since, there’s been a desperate effort by bien pensant types
throughout Europe to deny that the ever-increasing incidence of rape on
the continent has anything whatsoever to do with Islam. Some try to
dismiss or explain away the numbers entirely; others grudgingly
acknowledge them, while fiercely denying that there’s any Islamic
connection at all; some, while admitting that a disproportionate number
of rapists are immigrants, attempt to blame the problem on ethnic
European racism, the idea being that immigrants grow so frustrated over
their mistreatment that they resort to rape.

All of which is absurd to anyone who’s remotely aware of Islam
teachings about sex and of the high incidence of rape in Muslim
societies that is a direct consequence of those teachings. We’re talking
about a religion that treats the male sex drive as a virtually holy
phenomenon, and that allows men to have multiple marriages and divorce
at will, even as it demands that females deny themselves even the most
innocuous sorts of human contact in the name of preserving family honor –
and that punishes a single infraction with death. In the view of Islam,
when a man rapes an immodestly dressed woman, the rape isn’t his fault
but hers; and when a Muslim rapes an infidel in the “House of War,” it’s
recognized as a form of jihad. As forgiving as Islam is of virtually
every imaginable heterosexual act that might be committed by a Muslim
male, it’s equally unforgiving of a Muslim woman who happens to be
caught alone, doing nothing whatsoever, with a male who’s unrelated to
her, or who, for that matter, commits the inexcusable sin of being
raped.

The only thing worse than being raped, moreover, is tattling about
it. A couple of years ago, a Pakistani woman, Rooshanie Ejaz,
contributed several very frank essays on rape in Muslim countries to the
website of Norway’s Human Rights Service. Noting
in a March 2011 piece that “sexual abuse is actively hidden in
Pakistani society, and in Muslim society generally,” she said that “a
large percentage of the people I have grown up with have experienced
some form of it….Whether the act is committed by a cousin, uncle, house
servant, or stranger, the victim is likely to be subjected to further
abuse and emotional torment if she opens her mouth about it.”

One distinctive aspect of Islamic theology is its prescription of
rape as a punishment – a punishment usually imposed upon some innocent
female to avenge a crime committed by a male relative. In another 2011
piece, Ejaz cited
a Pakistani village court’s recent decision in the case of a young man
who’d been “seen with a young girl from a tribe superior to his”: it
ordered several of the girl’s male relatives to gang-rape the guilty
party’s sister, Mukhataran – who afterwards (as if the gang-bang itself
weren’t enough) “was paraded nude” through the village. Sharia justice
of this sort is commonplace in the Muslim world; the only thing special
in this instance was that Mukhataran complained to the authorities and
argued her case all the way up to the Pakistani Supreme Court – which,
in the end, freed five of the six defendants, even as a chorus of
prominent media figures and government leaders expressed sympathy for
the rapists and dragged Mukhataran’s name through the mud.

Pakistan did
pass a Women’s Protection Law in 2006 that allowed women to file rape
charges even without the four male witnesses that sharia law requires.
Before the law came along, 80% of Pakistani rape victims who dared to go
to the cops ended up behind bars for adultery while their assailants
remained free. Yet the law was a feeble instrument in a country drenched
with Islam; and in late May, the Council of Islamic Ideology, an
official body whose job it is to rule on the theological correctness of
Pakistani legislation, announced
that “DNA tests are not admissible as the main evidence in rape cases”
and that, indeed, lacking those four male witnesses, you’re better off
keeping quiet.

This rule doesn’t just apply to Pakistan, of course. In Afghanistan,
where freedom from Taliban rule cost the U.S. and its allies thousands
of lives and gazillions of dollars, the number of rape victims being
sent to prison is actually on the rise. In April, the Daily Mail ran a harrowing account
of a women’s prison in Kabul that’s full of inmates being punished for
crimes of which they were the victims. (According to women’s-rights
activists, “life for women is almost the same” in Afghanistan as under
the Taliban.) Then there’s Iran, where, according to a 2010 Guardian article, the government uses “rape and the threat of rape as weapons against its opponents.” A 2009 piece in the Huffington Post quoted
a young Iranian woman’s observation that rape victims in her country
routinely keep silent about their victimization because “a young woman
who has been raped can never be touched again.”

What about Syria? An April headline in the Atlantic didn’t
pull punches: “Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis.” A Syrian psychologist
who works with rape victims said that she always tells families rape is
“a way to break the family” and that she urges them, “Don’t let this
break you – this is what they’re trying to do.” (To which the women
respond: “Tell that to our husbands.”) A Toronto Star piece
acknowledged that rape victims in Syria risk “being cast out or even
killed to protect the family’s honour.” – yet managed, as so many of
these reports in the Western media do, to omit entirely the words
“Muslim” and “Islam.”

In wartime, Islam actively encourages the use of rape as a weapon and/or reward for the soldiers of Allah. On April 3, the Washington Times reported
that Salafi Sheikh Yasir al-Ajlawni had issued a fatwa permitting
Muslims who are fighting Assad’s regime to “capture and have sex with”
non-Sunni women. Raymond Ibrahim observed
the next day at Front Page that Aljawni wasn’t “the first cleric to
legitimize the rape of infidel women in recent times”: a top Saudi
preacher had recently green-lighted the gang-rape of captives, and an
Egyptian imam had explained how to turn captured infidels into sex
slaves. Yes, rape is almost invariably a side effect of war; but rape
instigated by clergy and carried out in the name of God is an Islamic
specialty.

In Libya, the number of rapes rose during its revolution – and has
kept rising ever since. “Gaddafi used rape as a weapon,” one Libyan
women’s-rights activist told the Guardian this
month. “It was organized and systematic.” While rape victims aren’t
imprisoned quite as often now as under Gaddafi, “there are still strong
disincentives against speaking out, making it hard for victims to access
help or to seek justice.” In March, two Pakistani-British women – who’d
just participated in the latest convoy seeking to break Israel’s Gaza
blockade – were gang-raped in Benghazi by a pack of Libyan soldiers.

So it goes. And yet when the growing incidence of rape in an
increasingly Muslim Europe is discussed by politicians, academics, and
mainstream journalists, such data are almost never adduced, the
theoligical and cultural background to these phenomena almost never
mentioned. In the last year or two I’ve written here about Oslo, where everyone found guilty of rape assault between 2006 and 2010 was “non-Western” (i.e. Muslim), and Sweden, with Europe’s second-highest percentage of Muslims and its highest rape figures; I’ve covered Britain‘s wave of Muslim “sex grooming” and Laurent Obertone’s documentation of Muslim rape in France.

All these developments have, of course, a common root – which it’s
impossible to understand without a basic awareness of Islamic teachings
about sex, gender roles, jihad, and so on. It’s all there, in the Koran,
the fatwas, the sermons and public statements by those European imams
who aren’t pretending to be building bridges and preaching love. No one
who’s reasonably well acquainted with Islamic belief and practice should
be surprised in the slightest by Europe’s rape epidemic. Unni Wikan
(though her prescribed response to it was nothing but multicultural
mush) saw it all quite clearly twelve years ago; Europe’s elites,
however, persist in their refusal to recognize this epidemic as part of
their continent’s transformation into a Muslim province. And so the
statistics continue to soar.

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and the author of
“While Europe Slept” and “Surrender.” His book "The Victims'
Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal
Mind" is just out from Broadside / Harper Collins.Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/islam-rape-and-theology/Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.